My satellite remote crapped out this weekend, so while I waited for the replacement, I decided that I’d watch Netflix. Since my favorite movies have to do with the military, I looked for flicks of that genre. I found this totally POS movie “Flesh Wounds” which stars Kevin Sorbo. Whoever their military adviser was on this flick should be run out of Hollywood on a rail. To begin with, they get their mission from this colonel;

Can you find anything correct on his uniform? What you can’t see is that he has two unit patches on his left shoulder – both full color. He offers the Sorbo character $150,000/per man for the operation, like our troops get paid by the mission, not by the month. Their big, scary member of the team is just a fat, flabby POS with fake tattoos. The dialogue is just nasty gay jokes. You can read some of the half-wit dialogue at the IMDb link. The firefights are a joke.

If you’re ever sitting around with your military friends and you want to have a contest counting the mistakes in a war movie, this is the one you want, if they can still see the movie through tears from laughter. I have no idea what the movie is about, I turned it off after the first firefight.

Comments (52)

It’s a good thing they didn’t blow their whole budget on any quality actors, that way they could spend their dollars on a great scriptwriter…wait they didn’t do that either…maybe they blew the budget on special effects? Nope not that reason…hmm maybe they spent it on 4ss and cigars like the line in the movie.

If Mystery Science Theater was still running this would make a perfect subject movie.

You have obvioulsy never seen the cinematic masterpiece titled Terror In Beverly Hills, starring one Frank Stallone. The lead character is a former Marine Green beret (you read tthat right) Mmedal Of honor rcipient who needs to rescue teh president’s daughter from Middle Eastern terrorists (are there anny other kind of terroists?). And the name of the character that Frank portrays? Hack Stone! Check out the reviews on IMDB. I dare you! I used to make my new guys watch this as part of their indoctrination, but it bordered on hazing.

#1 The MST3k guys are still around doing Cinematic Titanic (Joel and the old bots) and Rifftrax (Mike and the new bots). Even better is that Rifftrax lets you upload your own and they’ll sell it. We’re working on Percy Jackson and U571 or Pearl Harbor since both of us are history buffs.

Now you begin to understand the pain which I am forced to endure when I see steaming piles of celluloid guano such as, “Crimson Tide, “The Fifth Missile, “Hunt For Red October,” and that thankfully cancelled POS “Last Resort?”

Kosovo Campaign (but no stars?)
Joint Service Commendation
National Defense Service
American Defense Service (from before WW2!!!!)
Silver Star
Nato
Army Achievement (or maybe WW2 Europe Africa Middle East Campaign, it’s kind of dark in that photo)

The correct order might be:

Silver Star
Joint Service Commendation
Army Achievement
American Defense Service
National Defense Service
Kosovo Campaign (with at least one star)
Nato

But it sure seems odd a guy like that has no wings or combat badges–how did he get the Silver Star without combat? Do Staff Officer get Silver Stars?? Wouldn’t he likely have a Bronze Star too???? And at least a Purple Heart?

Looking at it again it was a WW2 Europe Africa Middle East Campaign ribbon. And he does have both 5th Army and 7th Army patches on his left shoulder and a Specialist patch on his right… It’s like they didn’t even try…

Don’t blame the Mil Advisor. I used to work as one. The Mil Advisor is exactly that an advisor. He makes only the decisions that the Director and the Producers allow him to make. A lot of those decisions are based on “artistic liscense”.

The movie similar to this for me was a Charles Bronson movie called Assassination. Mr Bronson is playing a Secret Service agent tasked with protecting the First Lady and of course in that world Law Rockets are standard issue for Secret service agents. Here’s a scene from it, i won’t bother telling you all that’s wrong with it, especially since i’m sure anyone of you could name a lot more cause i’m not even that into things that go boom. But even I know that Law rockets don’t do this:

Later on in the movie he’s given a small gun and the guy handing it to him says something like “Don’t be fooled by its size, if fires five shotgun shells”. Then later on in the movie we see this little gun making this huge shotgun blast and the person I was seeing it with insisted that we leave. I was having a laugh, but he prefers his movies to obey the laws of physics.

Caught a entertaining sub movie by chance on TCM titled “Torpedo Run” from 1958 w/ Glenn Ford and Ernest Borgnine. The flick is about a ww2 sub commander and his obsession in sinking a Japanese aircraft carrier…really solid stuff all around – specifically the cinematography.

I actually kind of regret walking out of it. It had a so-bad-it’s-good kind of charm to it. But if you’re a stickler for reality, or even something slightly resembling it, that’s not the movie for you.

#24 has a great point. I too have advised on several films and my experience varies greatly. Having said that, I never received any pushback at all about uniforms and the prop houses out there have everything you need. The problem is that many of these prop houses think they are military experts and they are really just full of shit.

Great story. I was dialogue coaching on a film a couple of years back and went to the set on day three of shooting. I had asked about a mil advisor and was assured they had one of the best doing that. A guy wearing an Army Class A uniform approached me about his dialogue changes.

He was supposed to be a Colonel. However, instead of eagles on his uniform as rank, he was sporting Army aviator wings on each shoulder!

wait a minute…. worse than “The Boys in Company C”? I heard when I was in Germany that when they showed that in Bad Tolz, and they got to the end scene in which a Special Forces Major was hiding behind a Vietnamese kid in the attack, that the local Group guys pretty well trashed the theater. Anyone know for sure?

A Marine I used to work for was an extra in BICC during the receiving scene. He said most of actors portraying recruits were dicks, and after they screened the premiere, he and the rest of the Marines that were extras kind of obscured their faces as they left the theater, embarrassed to be associated with the movie.

My wife was an extra on an ABC Movie Of The Week, Heroes Of Desert Storm. AS far as I know, it was only broadcast once, which is one too many. She has a Kevin Bacon factor of two or three, which means that I have a Kevin Bacon Factor of three or four. Now, if I could only get in a movie with Frank stallone, I would be all set.

A while back, I was watching a festering turd pile called “Green Zone” starring Maaaattt Daaay-monnn on HBO. I had to turn it off during a scene where one of the characters was wearing a CIB upside down.

We need a tourney for rating the all time WORST military movies around! I’ve bought a few out of the $5 discount bin at Wally World just for the comedic value. I see if i van find them and list some titles!?

What about that MST 3K favorite “Starfighters”? How do you ruin a movie featuring one of the coolest fighters ever? Why, just use a smooth, lite jazz soundtrack over endless scenes of aerial refueling! And make sure to have waaay more footage of refueling, landing, taxiing, and ugly guys drinking & talking than you have of the planes doing cool stuff. And ruin the cool stuff with more of that lite jazz.

yat Yas @38, if you do list the movies, show your work. You have to tell what makes each uniquely crappy in it’s own special way. Please cite dialog, costumes, glaring technical mistakes, incredible holes in the plot, and whether it qualifies as bad bad, or guilty pleasure bad. I’ll post some reviews when I get home tonight.

Completely off topic, driving onto Quantico this morning, most of the pink spray paint must have been sand-blasted off, but you can still see traces. I guess next they will hit the Tomb Of The Unknown.

I don’t know which of these was the worst:
Hamburger Hill – Vietnam
Pork Chop Hill – still not sure where that was
Top Gun – sorry, I still think Cruise looked far too young in that, like he was just out of high school
Taras Bulba — too choppily edited and Tony Curtis looked about as Kazakh-ish as a bowl of mashed potatoes
Sgt Bilko – theatrical remake, nothing like the orginal TV show (not really a war movie)
Memphis Belle — just another excuse to give out of work actors some cameo shots; every cliche’ in the book; they even got the dog on the runway into it
The Way We Were – Do we HAVE TO put Streisand and Redford together EVERY COTTON PICKIN’ TIME? (not actually a war movie, but set back then)

Good sub movies:
Gray Lady Down
Das Boot (The Boat)

Bad sub movies:
On the Beach — still can’t reconcile the timing in the last scenes before doomsday strikes
Hunt For Red October — the only good thing in it was Sean Connery, and I already asked Sparky about the caterpillar drive – never gonna happen
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (Disney) – just LOVE that giant squid

Silly movies
Down Periscope — very funny, have a copy
Wackiest Ship in the Army — right up to the last 15 minutes
Launch ‘Em – a black & white film shot and edited by the crew of the Kitty Hawk in 1968. You will probably never see it.

Good war movies:
Gone With the Wind – that scene in Atlanta where the camera pulls back and shows the wounded at the train station, and the scene in the hospital where the doctor is amputating some poor soul’s leg without an anesthetic
Victory At Sea — Navy’s combat camera group film groups doing their job in World War II

@39 & 40: StarFighters has to be one of my favorite MST3k movies. For a while over on the (now gone) Paratrooper.net, my signature was a line from that movie. It was Tom Servo’s summation of the story: “So, according to themselves, the Air Force is a bunch of lumpy faced, hard drinking, not-too-bright speed freaks who poop in their pants and can’t make it with women?”

“Wind Talkers” was not just a terrible movie, it was a slur on the reputation of the USMC because the central “conflict” of the movie was that Nic Cage was ordered to murder his own men if it looked like they’d be captured by the enemy, which is a 100% falsehood. If I was a jarhead I’d be extremely pissed at that movie.

Of course, Nic Cage also pissed all over the Army in his awful, awful, awful movie “Fire Birds” with Sean Young and Tommy Lee Jones.

It’s easier to list the good movies about the military (because that list is so small.)

Two of my favorites are “Gardens of Stone” with James Caan and James Earl Jones, and an odd little independent movie that came out of the 1980’s called “84 Charlie Mopic.” It’s sort of a Vietnam-war era “Blair Witch Project” kind of “found footage” movie. Very interesting.

#39 You cite The Starfighters and leave out Red Zone Cuba? I think they’re the same director though, so there is that. Also, since I didn’t post it earlier for some reason. http://mst3konline.blogspot.com/ What movies aren’t listed there can still be found on Youtube, usually in full.

I actually had to order Down Periscope because I couldn’t find it. I could see copies of movies that as a kid I thought were miserable, but finding a movie that’s actually funny? Hell no.

Any takes on Juggernaut? I was suggested the movie after I tore Hurt Locker to shreds. Lastly, it’s not a movie, but if you guys want to see the absolute worst in writing with the military, go find a Let’s Play or a cheapo copy of Home Front. Written by the guy behind Red Dawn with multiple, repeated head banger moments and other blisteringly stupid decisions. Incendiary Mortars used by an inexperienced guy danger close? Oops watch that friendly fire. Obvious trap, commented on by the characters? Better walk into it anyway. Enemy has air superiority? We’re going in by Helicopter without any fighter suppor-oh look another helicopter got shot down.

The guns never have magazines in them, and they simulate gunfire with animated-in flashes. As for uniform mistakes, at one point, they get a briefing from a three-star ADM wearing the large insignia normally seen on the Ike jacket on the collar of his wash khakis.

I bought it at Wal-Mart for $6, which was about $4 more than they spent on the production.

I was flipping through the movie channels and caught part of a “film” entitled Dead Men Can’t Dance. This movie is so bad the World Court should put the producers on trial for war crimes. The description is “Elite army unit is assigned to destroy North Korea’s lone nuclear facility.” In the film, the elite Army unit consists of the first all female Ranger unit. I was quite impressed on what it takes to become a Ranger, which according this, consists of standing in a pool of water until you defecate and being threatened and slapped one time by someone posing as a North Korean Intelligence Officer. If you can force yourself into watching the entire movie, which should be an endurance test for anyone going through actual Ranger training, you just may reconsider the awarding of the worst military movie ever made. And the worst part is that everyone’s favorite military veteran. R. Lee Ermey, is in it. Talk about the walk of the shame.

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About thisainthell

We are all military combat veterans and we write primarily from that perspective. Everyone who writes here has a Combat Infantry Badge, a Combat Medic Badge, a Combat Action Badge or a Combat Action Ribbon. We write about issues that matter to combat veterans..read more »